A Catholic priest, Rev. Fr. Samuel Oyetoro, has been found murdered in Kogi State, Nigeria, after being attacked with a machete.
The priest's body was discovered by the roadside with severe machete wounds to the head. He served at St. Paul's Parish.
His killing comes amid Nigeria's long-running security crisis, where Christian communities, particularly in the north and Middle Belt, have repeatedly been targeted by Islamist groups such as Boko Haram and ISWAP, as well as Fulani Islamist militias. More than a thousand Christians have been murdered so far this year alone.
At 6:00 AM sharp, my neighbor Harold steps onto his lawn to raise the American flag.
He is seventy-four. He wears a pressed shirt, moves with the precision of a clockwork automaton, and treats the wind as a personal enemy.
If the flag twists against the pole, he stands there for twenty minutes, staring at the rope, calculating aerodynamic resistance until the breeze surrenders.
I began adjusting my morning tea schedule to observe this daily battle. A warrior respects proper protocol.
On a windy Tuesday, the flag caught on a high bracket. Harold reached up, but he was three inches short.
I crossed the grass without a word. I am six feet tall. I extended my arm, cleared the fabric, and stepped back into a formal stance.
Harold did not say thank you. He looked at the flag, looked at my shoulder angle, and said, "Your posture is acceptable. Tomorrow, six o'clock. You hold the rope tension."
I had not applied for a military position. I had simply reached for a piece of cloth. Yet by sunrise the next morning, I was standing at attention in my bathrobe, managing rope drag for a retired artillery officer.
We performed this silent ceremony for three months. We spoke a total of fourteen words. I learned that a three-degree tilt in the hoist is considered a national tragedy in Haroldâs domain.
In October, the flag remained at half-mast for four days.
I walked to his porch. The house was quiet. Harold was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out at the empty yard.
He pointed to the second-floor window across the street.
"My wife had dementia," he said softly. "For five years, she couldn't remember my name. But every morning at six, she would look out that window, see me raising the flag, and know she was safe at home."
She had passed away on Monday.
Harold looked at his hands. "I don't know who I'm raising it for tomorrow."
I went back to my house. I did not sleep.
At 5:55 AM, I stood on his lawn in a dark suit. Behind me stood Kevin, Tony, and four other men from the street, all dressed in their finest jackets, standing in a straight line in the morning mist.
Harold walked out to the porch. He stopped.
Kevin stepped forward and said, "Sir. The wind is coming from the east. We require your orders."
Harold looked at the seven men standing at attention on his grass. His chest expanded. His shoulders straightened.
He walked down the steps, took the rope, and gave the command.
The flag went up. It has never flown higher.
At a sports bar in Ohio, my friend offered me an "Atomic" chicken wing.
"You handle heat?"
A samurai does not decline a challenge on foreign soil.
"I welcome the spice," I said.
I took one bite.
My soul left my body. My eyesight blurred. My throat felt like it had been sliced with a heated blade.
I wiped my lips with a napkin, forced a calm smile, and said, "A refreshing kick."
My friend blinked. "Dude... that's Carolina Reaper. You didn't even sweat."
He called the bartender. The bartender called the cook.
"He ate the Atomic with a straight face! Heâs a demon!"
The manager brought out a bright yellow t-shirt that said "ATOMIC SURVIVOR" and draped it over my shoulders.
I sat there, unable to move a single muscle, my stomach burning to ash while 50 strangers chanted my name.
I have never been prouder.
I have never needed an ambulance more.
Over 1,300 British farms have joined a new app in about twelve weeks. It is called Only Farmers, it was named deliberately after OnlyFans, and the parallel runs deeper than the joke intends.
Both are platforms where the producer sells direct access to themselves, because the people who used to pay them stopped paying enough to live on.
Lisa Hogan built it with her son Wolfe Bentinck, after five years of farmers coming into the Diddly Squat shop to thank her for the programme and then tell her their own version of it. Her words: this is for smaller farmers who do not have a marketing budget or Amazon.
Look at what is being sold.
Farm stays. Vineyard tours. Cheese-making. Beekeeping. Weddings. Lambing days. Clarkson's own summary this week was that you could walk an alpaca or milk a cow.
Every item on that list is something a farmer does anyway. Unpaid, at four in the morning, in February, as part of a job that a government review found loses money on nearly a third of British farms.
The novelty version pays. The work does not.
A family will hand over real money to stand in a shed for two hours and watch a ewe give birth. That same lamb, reared for months and sold through the proper chain, goes at a price the farmer is not allowed to set.
The second half of the app is grimmer still, because it also runs farmer-to-farmer equipment rental. Farms hiring kit to each other, because too few can justify owning their own.
None of which is a criticism of Hogan. She has built something useful, after listening at a till for five years. Book the alpaca. The money goes where it should.
But 1,300 signups in twelve weeks is not enthusiasm for an app. It is 1,300 farms reaching the same conclusion in the same season, which is that the dependable money is in the experience rather than the food.
We have arrived at a country where a farm earns more reliably from charging strangers to watch it farm.
Nobody thought that was worth remarking on.
đš JUST IN: Elon Musk RIPS the Red Cross after they got caught DELETING a shocking video that praised a Muslim migrant â Sharif Ahmadzai â who migrated to Britain and KlLLED A WOMAN
Then he hid her body in a suitcase...
Absolutely unbelievable. THIS IS WHO THEY PRAISE
ELON: "The Red Cross has far more positive branding than it deserves. As organizations go, they would be on the leaderboard for suicidal empathy." đŻ
h/t @BasilTheGreat
Queen!!! đ
Scarlett Johansson refused to remove the Holocaust-related storyline from her directorial debut Eleanor the Great â even when one of the financiers threatened to pull out of the project. In the end, he did leave and took his funding with him.
The film tells the story of a 94-year-old woman who accidentally ends up in a support group for Holocaust survivors. There, she begins telling the survival story of her late friend, presenting it as her own.
One of the investors demanded that the central idea of the film be changed and the plot rewritten. But Johansson refused.
âThey were against what the film actually was,â she said. âIf you take the Holocaust out â then what is the story about? They didnât offer any alternative; they just said it was a problem.â
The project was left without full financing, but Scarlett didnât give up. At the last moment, Sony Pictures Classics came on board, and filming finally began.
Even on set, Johansson insisted on maximum authenticity. With the support of the Holocaust Foundation, she invited actual Holocaust survivors to play roles in the support-group scenes â so that their voices, faces, and personal stories would become part of the film and of the memory it seeks to preserve.
If we donât remember them today, who will remember us tomorrow?đ